Monday, May 08, 2017

Film accurately describes the Tunisian-Jewish story

While many films about Jews from Arab countries are wistful excursions into nostalgia, this documentary, which was shown on the French channel TV5 Monde recently, is an exception. If you understand French, I do recommend 'Tunisie, une Memoire juive' by Fatma Cherif. (with thanks: Ralph)

The Jewish landmarks of Tunis - the splendid modernist synagogues, for example - still exist, a reminder of a once-thriving community of over 100,000, reduced to fewer than 2,000, mainly on the island of Djerba. The film does not shy away from discussing the dhimmi culture of submission resulting in the execution of Batto Sfez, an innocent Jew accused of blaspheming against Islam in 1857.

When Tunisia became a French protectorate, its capital Tunis was a flourishing Jewish city in the early part of the 20th century. The Alliance Israelite Universelle equipped Jewish boys and girls with knowledge and skills to cope with modernity. The Nazi occupation of Tunisia in 1942 marked a terrible period for 2,000 Jews, dragooned into forced labour camps. Jewish doctors gathered X-rays to gain the maximum number of dispensations.

Then came the first wave of Jews departing for Israel. With independence in 1956, hopes that the Jews would replace the departing French were soon dashed. Jews were systematically marginalised, as Arabs were promoted in their place.

Sophie Bessis, whose grandfather Andre was a minister in the Bourguiba government, says that no government representative attended his funeral. She explains that Jews were never made to feel an organic part of the Tunisian nation. Even if they were nominally equal, they would always be considered outsiders.

They were at first identified with the French colonials, and the 1961 Bizerte crisis, resulting in the French withdrawing from their naval base, left the Jewish community without protection. "They were pushed towards the exit, and no Arab intellectuals tried to help them push back," she says.

The furious Arab reaction to the Six Day War resulted, for the first time, in an anti-Jewish pogrom - windows of Jewish shops were smashed and the Great Synagogue of Tunis damaged. In spite of reassurances by President Bourguiba, the remaining Jews had had enough - they were now considered to represent Israel in an Arab country. They left overnight, leaving everything.

Lucette Valensi touches on the difficulties of adapting to exile in France. Her dreams were about Tunisia. When she exited at her metro station, she expected to step out into the relaxed sunshine of the Place de la Casbah. Instead, she was greeted with the darkness of a Paris winter. Another interviewee describes the scene in the 1960s when two ships crossed outside Tunis, one bearing departing Jews, while the other bore a load of incoming Jews who had failed to adjust to life in France.'You're mad,' each load gesticulated to one another.

All in all, the film pulls no punches and gives an accurate representation of the story of Tunisian Jews. It can be criticised, however, for giving the impression that Jews arrived in the country after Islam. The final scene dwells on the Djerba pilgrimage without stating that this last bastion of the Jewish community goes back 2,000 years.

Eliyahu,I agree to a certain degree. She did sanitized too much the iconic Habib Bourguiba by showing him exclusively with his open and inclusive discourse on the Tunisian Jewish heritage and the Jewish rights to Tunisian citizenship and land.

Although, I would have liked to listen to Tunisian Arab intellectuals of that time with independence struggle against the French as well as recent ones, but there were none. I suspect that the outcome would have been the usual diatribe on the diabolical plot of the elders of the Zion narrative against the Arab nation and Islam. It would not surprise me that many Arab intellectual would have declined participating for fear of being pushed to say what's really deep in their hearts. But then again,I cannot be certain if Fatma had extended the invitation to the few of them.

But we have to commend Fatma for presenting a wide range discussions from some brilliant personalities (yet unknown) regarding their own individual experience with the Arab anti-Jewish sentiments and the bitter realities of exile in France. Their analysis also focuses the Jewish community as a whole with its marginalization and eventual demise in the hand Arab Nationalism.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)